Summary

The schema is the most complex part of Active Directory. The abstract schema is helpful for casual browsing and inspection of object and property types. However, working directly with Active Directory's implementation of the schema is often necessary to fully understand the behavior of the directory.

Extending the directory is not as difficult as it might seem. In fact, the ease with which it's accomplished should remind you of the importance of carefully assessing the impact such extensions will have on the size of the directory, client access traffic, and bandwidth issues related to replication.

In the next chapter, I'll look at performing common network administration tasks using Windows Script.